I have been reading the answers of this thread and I'm amuzed about people trying to "decrypt" or "reverse" the hash, once you have it... why don't you try to LOOK FOR IT IN <PUT HERE YOUR FAVOURITE WEB SEARCH ENGINE (i.e. GOOGLE)>

olelen wrote:I have been reading the answers of this thread and I'm amuzed about people trying to "decrypt" or "reverse" the hash, once you have it... why don't you try to LOOK FOR IT IN <PUT HERE YOUR FAVOURITE WEB SEARCH ENGINE (i.e. GOOGLE)>

In a real life situation yes, I would encourage this because sometimes you do get lucky. However, this defeats the purpose of the mission. You need to learn to do it yourself if google fails you.

"The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear...""Drink all the booze, hack all the things."

I hope to be able to understand me without spoil anything.what i want to know is:is the *bak* file suppose to be an error log of some type since i see in it "error matching hash [cut]"?what is suppose to be the file "h***" that i found in the other directory? How do i open it? Is that the one that the admin doesn't want 'me' to see?

^Sounds like you have not found the hash input. My advice is to try to look around the database page by playing with the directory.

I have looked up hashing, but I still don't understand why, given the 1-to-1 relationship between the input and the digest by its collision resistance property, am I not able to construct a reverse algorithm (by feeding into it the digest) and solve for the input in constant time?

In other words, ifH(a) = AwhyH'(A) = awhere H' is the reversing algorithm is impossible to construct?

I find it a bit magical myself, but the Wikipedia page on hash functions may be able to shed some light on what allows it to be 1-to-1 while keeping it irreversible. I have a feeling there is a lot of overflow/modulo action going on in those algorithms.

Edit: check out ext-basic 10 and 11. Specifically 11. This deals with hashing algorithms in a very basic sense.

The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty; it's merely twice as big as it needs to be.